"Ask physicians and nurses across the nation what they need most to
improve the efficiency and quality of health care, and the most frequent
answer is instant access to reliable information about their patients. But
the implementation of electronic systems for the exchange of information
among emergency departments and community clinics has been lagging."

EDLink project that is a result of the collaboration
of Wisconsin Health Information Exchange
(WHIE), the Milwaukee Health Care Partnership, the State of Wisconsin Department
of Health and Family Services, and Microsoft Corporation, a unique system is
being established to secure and share medical information and to facilitate
care coordination protocols that will assist in caring for patients,
providing for better continuity of care, and improving patient safety. The EDLink project is the first step toward implementation of
a secure health information exchange system that will enhance care
coordination and provide needed medical information to clinicians when
patients present for care. In the first phase of implementation, the EDLink project shall provide emergency physicians
immediate access to past medical history for patients that register for care
at their facilities. This will be accomplished in a manner that is virtually
transparent to current workflow. The EDLink
project shall follow a structured development path with specific milestones.
The first phase of the project will commence on April 1, 2007 and will end
March 31, 2009. The goals of the EDLink project
will be to demonstrate improvements in health care quality, including
decreased redundancy of testing, improved decision making by clinicians,
reductions in medical errors and improvements in cost efficiency. An
independent evaluation of the EDLink project will
be provided by a team comprised of experienced academic researchers from the
University of Wisconsin in Madison and the Medical College of Wisconsin. The
evaluation of the project will include the following components:

System performance,
including technical server performance and ED performance